Everybody loves a good meeting. Especially when they run into lunch time or get way off topic or have people falling asleep into their cold morning coffee. Yep, aren’t meetings the best. No matter where you work all meetings end up the same, with frustrating banter and the infamous line, “lets pick this up in the next meeting”. Here are five things that happen in every meeting ever.

Gold Star Student

Sales meetings are just the worst. Especially when the top sales person who has ten years more than you on the job and a full customer portfolio is always more than happy to tell you how much better than you they are. Every team has one and if you think your team doesn’t…well that means you are that person. We get it, we have to speak about accomplishments but it shouldn’t be about internal competition where more than likely not everyone is on level playing ground.

Can you hear me now?

100mbps broadband, latest software and drivers…yet every video conference will start with at least one party member not being able to hear you or problems with video buffering. Knowing that everyone is looking, you try and maintain a calm facial expression as you vigorously type in the chat box “is your speaker on mute?” while simultaneously mouthing “again”.

This Meeting could have been an email

How many times has this happened to you? You go in with all your data ready, you start throwing figures out there and show all the amazing graphs only to realise that people aren’t taking it in and an email to individuals would have been the better option. Now sit there for twenty minutes of a hijacked meeting about why there isn’t enough almond milk in the fridge and other off topic issues. Almond milk isn’t even milk, wake up people!

Is everyone here?

No matter what you do there will always be someone missing and someone who is not happy that they weren’t asked to the meeting. This missing person will also tend to be the one person who needed to hear this info the most and the unhappy person who didn’t get an invite will also be that one person who complains they have too many meetings.

The Scheduler

If someone in the room says I have another meeting…they don’t. What really happened is they got bored and would rather be absolutely anywhere else other than this meeting. If the first thing they ask is “how long is this meeting down for?” then it’s time to give up and just send them the minutes.

Got any other common meeting occurrences for us? Share them on our social media feeds. But don’t do it while you attend a meeting, that’s just rude.